“If you don’t have Thor’s hammer, Hulk’s bulk, Captain America’s resolve or Iron Man’s know-how, what’s an Avenger to do? The answer provided by Ant-Man is to go small, smaller than Black Widow’s fingernail, and exude a good sense of humor, which is precisely what floats this latest addition to the Marvel firmament,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy. “The timing might even be fortuitous as far as the fan base is concerned, what with the sense of overkill emanating from the most recent Avengers installment and a mirth quotient in the new outing that, by Marvel standards, ranks behind only that of the disarming Guardians of the Galaxy last summer.
“Although the story dynamics are fundamentally silly and the family stuff, with its parallel father-daughter melodrama, is elemental button-pushing, a good cast led by a winning Paul Rudd puts the nonsense over in reasonably disarming fashion.
“The geek world, even if it approves what has finally emerged onscreen, will still always wonder what Ant-Man would have been like if, as originally intended, Edgar Wright, he of Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World cultish veneration, had directed the screenplay he wrote with Joe Cornish. Would it have been more extreme, irreverent, idiosyncratic and, in the end, less Marvel-like?
